Those who’ve enjoyed my weekly “Big Takeover” show on Breakthruradio.com the last six-and-a-half years, and have missed it the last month—or would just like to hear a weekly companion to Big Takeover magazine’s coverage—will be glad to know I will be resuming it in the same weekly 90-minute+, format, only listener-supported from now on, at our new home on Realpunkradio.com, starting this Monday, January 26!
The new re-debut of the show will once again be back at our usual time at 12 noon every Monday going forward. And best of all, the show will not only be available by streaming (with rewind capability, unlike some other web radio/podcast options I looked at) but will also be downloadable through iTunes, etc., and listeners will be able to subscribe to the show thusly so they don’t miss any! In fact, here’s the link to our brand new show page, where you can access the show(s) and see each week’s track listing and extra info as well.
Note, Realpunkradio.com’s “real punk” moniker refers to the original punk “attitude,” and not the punk genre as it has come to be so narrowly defined. Theirs is the much more open-ended idea I prefer: that anything applies that has that independent, artist-first spirit with heart and edge, and provides an alternative to commercial pabulum—without regard to genre restriction, within only the bounds of taste from today’s music to the distant past! Check out some of the other shows on the station, and you will see why I think my show fits in well with their other DJ hosts. In particular, a couple of other shows even take their names from Replacements songs, a band that surely personified/es that spirit. And I am honored to be invited to join them at their station, and I’m thrilled to have found a new, supportive place of like-minded folks that can also help take care of the legit licensing/royalties issues for me that are both tremendously expensive and bedeviling! (Congress really screwed this one up, if you ask me.)
Perhaps the only difference between the new show and the BTR one is that going forward my show will have to be listener supported, as the program is no longer funded through BTR and will receive no other backing in the future. To that end, I/we can greatly use your support for both the radio show and our Big Takeover magazine and site going forward. (The mag has been operating on a shoestring for years since the bottom fell out of both the print magazine industry, with the closing of book stores nationwide, and the music business too; and the BTR show had been partially subsidizing the mag.)
Fortunately it’s easy to become a patron of the show and mag: I’ve set up a page over at Patreon where it’s a cinch, and you can contribute whatever monthly amount you like, and there are rewards, too. For starters, anyone who becomes a patron of the show and mag will have their names listed in each issue of Big Takeover (unless you would prefer not) starting with the next one this spring, #76. And even those who pledge as little as $5 a month (i.e., roughly $1 a show!) will get a couple free back issues of the mag (of your choice) for us to send you as a token of our gratitude; likewise, those who pledge as little as $10 a month (i.e. roughly $2 a show!) will get a free subscription (or issues added to your exiting one, or more free back issues). Then, the goodies increase at $20 and $50 – I’m even buying lunch in Brooklyn for anyone in the latter category. (Why not? Of course, that will mean you have to get here, but at least it’s a free meal and hopefully decent company. Well… talkative company, at least.)
I’m hoping this listener-sponsored model works, as it often does for some of the best independent terrestrial radio stations in the country. I can do it with your help, for sure! And it would sure help the mag, as well. (The printing/shipping/mailing costs just keep going up and up and up.)
In any case, my sincere thanks to the BTR folks for being our home from 2008-2014. I wish them well, and all my old shows are still easily heard there, all 333 of them, plus 60 or so Rabid Session” broadcasts, at Jack Rabid BTR page). And also thanks to my former producer of that show, Bryan Swirsky, for his own contributions—I will be on my own making these RPR shows, now. And to Jim Santo at our site and Mike Hurst over at Pancake Factory for their considerable help in getting me started in re-launching this!
And I hope everyone will tune in again this Monday, and every Monday going forward. It’s the same show you knew and hopefully loved up through this past December 24: mostly dependent on new records, with a share of vintage material from my whole collection thrown in, to liven things up and provide context. (The last show I did even had a blues song from 1929 or so by the young Gene Autry, aping his contemporary Jimmie Rodgers.) Or, if you’re a new listener, it’s a great time to check out the fun, and the music, and my occasional awful singing I often begin shows with as a spot of levity. Feel free to wince at that part!
And also feel free to send me requests; if I like them, I will play them. Enjoy the show, every one! Hurrah!
(P.S. there are two “Rabid Sessions at Pancake Factory Studios” shows in the can that will also be coming along to the new show in the weeks to come; one with San Francisco’s Slowness, the other with Quebec’s Jet Black (who are one of the stars of the Cake Shop show in New York we are sponsoring February 7 with Soft Science, The New Lines, and Pale Lights). Thereafter, Pancake’s Mike Hurst and I are cooking up some ideas for more sessions going forward that will be filmed as well as recorded! The first guinea pig will be Soft Science, in fact. Wish us—and them, ha ha—luck with that as well!)
